THE POLITICAL ECONOMY…OR IS THAT THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY?…OF HOPE

THE POLITICAL ECONOMY…OR IS THAT THE PSYCHOPATHOLOGY?…OF HOPE

(Published in the 25th Anniversary Issue of Fuse Magazine, November, 2002)

The pessimism of the intellect, the optimism of the will…Romain Rolland

Who wants to look back? We drag the last century around like a rusty chain we’re pretending isn’t there. Given the facts, isn’t denial the heart-smart choice?

Take Russia, for example. 80 years of famine, war, epidemics, gulags, Stalin, Hitler and the final ignominious, anarchic slide into Mafia driven capitalism spelling penury and chaos for the majority of the population.

And you thought the hellmouth was in Sunnydale!

Will I get through this without mentioning September 11? I guess not.

You have to hand it to the devil for his global marketing strategy. He’s selling Hellmouth Franchises all over the world, faster than Macdonald’s can destroy the rain forest. Chile, Cambodia, Kosovo. Indonesia, , Lebanon, Rwanda. South Africa, Ireland, Iraq, Kuwait. Oklahoma City, New York, Washington. And on the charts with a bullet, soon to be the Numero Uno war stock: the West Bank!

As if all that weren’t bad enough, we in the art world have had to deal with a decade or more of postmodern theory, the death of the meta-narratives. No vision of social evolution let alone revolution can stand up to the artspeakers who have convinced us that it’s just another story and all stories are equally fictitious.

To feel anything but despair and cynicism, you’d have to be plumb stupid. There’s no scope for hope, and without hope there can be no activism, and without activism, there can be no change. Change being of course, another fiction.

Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, famously proclaimed the “end of irony” a few days after the attacks on the World Trade Centre. Did he mean that we should start thinking in terms of good and evil, good firefighters, evil terrorists? That it was now OK to have feelings again? To feel sorry for the victims and their families? In any event, the era of sentimental journalism we’ve lived with for the last year is surely worse than the meanest of prior cynicism. And it’s not confined to the endless memorializing and tributes to the victims of 9/11, the slobbering over the Pope during World Youth Day, suddenly canonized as an ancient, wise holy man was just as bad. Forgotten are the church’s position on homosexuality (love the sinner, hate the sin), the exclusion of women, the antedeluvian views on abortion and a celibate clergy, and worst of all, the refusal to advocate the use of condoms in Africa, where up to 40% of the populace in some countries is HIV positive. Why that clever old devil has another Hellmouth dressed up to look like the church!

But let’s consider Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy is a morose and confused young woman. Her boyfriends leave her, her mother dies, she feels guilty about neglecting her younger sister She dies herself, and then comes back from the dead with part of her soul missing. Her “watcher” and father figure returns to England, her best friend and ally is battling an addiction to the dark powers,and Buffy can’t free herself from an obsessive sexual thing for a guy who’s cute, but a vampire. Yes, the world weighs heavily on Buffy’s shoulders, just as it does on our older, less toned ones. She never smiles, except for the occasional ironic and pained grin. Her deadpan one-liners are spoken from a hurting heart.

Yet ten minutes before the end of each and every episode, no matter how awful she feels, Buffy gets out there and righteously kicks vampire butt. What makes it interesting, besides those elegantly choreographed fight scenes, is that it isn’t just a ritual re-enactment of the battle of good against evil. It’s the fight against evil forces from the underworld with the knowledge that this world is already evil enough. In one episode, after her mother dies, Buffy finds she is broke and gets a job working in a fast food restaurant. (The question of how Buffy or anyone else makes a living never comes up again). The shots of vast quantities of meat being ground up in a giant grinder were far scarier than any demon or vampire their special effects people ever came up with. Even though the things coming out of the hellmouth are infinite in number and variety, Buffy manages to slay enough of them to keep Sunnyvale safe from demons, if not from humans, for another week.

My favourite banner from the first big anti-globalization protests in Seattle reads: You think globalization’s bad, wait til you see capitalism!” Because although the numbers of young people taking up the cause, like Buffy, are a source of optimism for me, I don’t really see an articulation of alternatives. There are the usual configurations of evolutionaries – those who want to soften the effects of globalization – and anarchists – those bent on radical forms of protest. But what’s missing is an analysis, a program, a manifesto, a platform. Both the old, the new and the middle-aged left are discredited. Socialism in one country famously failed, po-mo irony triumphed, and North American lefties fell into disrepute.

History itself has betrayed us and destroyed our trust. Yet if we comb through the rubble of the 20th century, back to the moment before history shacked up with the devil, we can uncover a spark of fervour for a better world that still might hold promise for us. In the ten years leading up to the Russian revolution, the politicos and the artists made common cause. Although new manifestoes and splinter groups formed and disintegrated faster than Buffy can vaporize a vampire, there was, I think, a thin red line of consistency: the belief that political revolution and spiritual regeneration were inseparable, two sides of the same coin, sisters under the skin. That’s what made the art revolutionary and the revolution artistic. Sure, there was the long since unfashionable modernist belief that new forms of technology were making a new human being and a new social order possible, a little hard to swallow after the dot.com debacle. And we all know the sad sorry tale that followed the revolution. But just that moment, that sweet decade, unique in history, when large numbers of artists and revolutionaries held different facets of the same vision, and at one and the same time overthrew the state, and overturned all previous ideas about what art is, and what poetry is…

So here’s to Buffy and the Russian avant garde, and here’s to the folks who demonstrate against the evils of globalization, and here’s to Jaddi Singh, for getting arrested using a teddy bear as an ostensible weapon. Indeed, I propose that like the Danes who wore yellow Stars of David in WWII, we build catapults and hurl teddy bears over all the real and virtual barriers we can find. Now that’s what I call a spectacle! Because the thing I want to see preserved for the future, against all odds and common sense and better judgement, is hope.

Robin C. Pacific
August 20, 2002